Katharina Grosse

Katharina Grosse was born in 1961 in Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany, and grew up in Bochum. She studied at the Kunstakademie Münster from 1982 to 1986 and continued her training at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf from 1987 to 1990. She later returned to academic life as a teacher, holding positions at Kunsthochschule Berlin-Weißensee from 2000 to 2010 and at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf from 2010 to 2018. Her formation within the German art academy tradition, combined with an early residency at Villa Romana in Florence in 1992, laid the groundwork for a practice that would eventually dissolve the boundaries between painting, sculpture, and architecture.

Grosse is best known for her monumental spray-paint installations, in which industrial pneumatic equipment becomes the instrument for flooding entire rooms, buildings, and outdoor landscapes with cascading fields of color. Works such as The Horse Trotted Another Couple of Metres, Then It Stopped (2008), Rockaway! (2016), and 7 Days, 7 Nights (2017) are defining examples of this approach — each one transforming a specific site into an immersive chromatic environment in which the conventional limits of the canvas are abandoned entirely in favor of walls, floors, soil, fabric, and found objects. Her participation in the Prospect.1 Triennial in New Orleans in 2008 and the Venice Biennale in 2015 brought this practice to broad international attention.

Her recognition spans multiple decades and geographies. Early career support came through the Schmidt-Rottluff Scholarship in 1993 and a Stiftung Kunstfonds stipend in 1995. She subsequently received the Fred Thieler Prize for Painting in 2003, the Oskar Schlemmer Prize awarded by the state of Baden-Württemberg in 2014, and the Otto-Ritschl Prize in Wiesbaden in 2015. Institutional collections holding her work include the Centre national des arts plastiques in Paris, the Centre Pompidou-Metz, the Fondation Louis Vuitton, and the Kemper Art Museum in St. Louis. A traveling retrospective moved through Kunstmuseum Bonn, Kunstmuseum Bern, and the Kemper Art Museum in 2022.

Grosse is jointly represented by Gagosian, Galerie Max Hetzler, Galerie nächst St. Stephan Rosemarie Schwarzwälder, and White Cube. Recent and forthcoming solo exhibitions include Pie Sell, Lee Slip, Eel Lips at Gagosian in 2024, The Bedroom at Galerie Max Hetzler in Paris in 2023, HIGH NOON LUMEN at Galerie Max Hetzler in Berlin in 2025, and solo presentations at the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart in 2025 and the Munch Museum in Oslo in 2026. In 2026, Texte zur Kunst dedicated an artist edition feature to her work under the title Katharina Grosse, Fünfunddreißig Jahre Schönheit.